The Ice Cradle (17 page)

“I did?”

He nodded.

I leaned back myself and let out a relieved breath.

“So I guess my secret’s out,” he went on.

I hoped that I knew which secret he meant—the same secret I intended to keep from him—but I had to be sure. Believing that a spark usually goes both ways, and that you don’t feel it unless the other person does, too, I leapt into the void.

“You mean our little—
frisson
?” I asked.

He gave me a puzzled frown.

“Frisson
. It’s French.”

He shook his head and shrugged.

At last
, I thought!
Something!
A gorgeous fisherman who used “whom” correctly, liked my son, got along famously with his sister, and knew how to cook, build cabins, wire sconces,
and
speak French would have been completely and utterly irresistible.

It sort of took the
frisson
out of
frisson
to have to define the
word for him, but this was my fault for trotting it out in the first place.

“It’s kind of like a—sizzle,” I said.

“Ah.” He smiled. He pointed to himself, then to me, then back to himself.

I nodded. He nodded.

Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. An enormous robin made a rough landing on the grass nearby and proceeded to peck around. Off in the distance, someone took a chain saw to a tree or a log, and the whirring sound reminded me that I had to make a dentist appointment when I got back; one of my back teeth had gotten sensitive to cold. The silence felt companionable for a couple of minutes, but pretty soon it started to feel awkward. Then really awkward. Since I was the one who had made this moment all but inevitable, I figured it was up to me to speak first.

“I didn’t mean to …” I trailed off. I didn’t mean to—what? Kiss him? Yes I had. I hadn’t meant to make him uncomfortable, though.

Bert looked over.

“Sorry if I jumped the gun.”

“You didn’t.”

“I mean, maybe you’re not ready to …”

“Make out? Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Get involved again,” I clarified, though freewheeling tomfoolery was A-OK by me.

“Now
that
, I don’t know,” he finally said. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

My heart leapt at the prospect of having the chance to find out. I couldn’t, however, let him glimpse my delight.

“I guess we will,” I said dryly.

“Are you seeing anyone?” he asked.

I shook my head.

He gave me a skeptical look.

“I’m
not!”

“Since when?”

“Since—forever! It’s not that easy. I’ve got a kid.” I waited for him to jump in, but when he didn’t, I went on. “Well, I was seeing someone last fall. Briefly.”

“Why briefly?”

I shrugged.

“He didn’t like your having Henry?”

“No, it wasn’t that. He had a daughter himself. But he had a problem with the ghost stuff.”

“Really?”

“I think it freaked him out.”

Bert nodded. I wondered if he’d take the opportunity to quiz me on the subject, but he just reached over and pushed a lock of hair out of my face.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I responded.

“We could go for it in the back of the truck,” he suggested, deadpan.

I must have looked kind of shocked, though the idea had instant appeal, because he hastened to add, “I’m kidding.”

“Damn,” I said, but I couldn’t keep a straight face.

He hooted at this remark, then leaned over and kissed me like he really meant business.

“Rain check?” I whispered.

“Rain check,” he replied.

I’ve probably seen thousands of ghosts in my lifetime, but the scene by the Southeast Lighthouse unnerved even me. Granted, the sky had abruptly darkened with a low layer of portentous storm clouds, and fat, intermittent raindrops had begun to dot the dust on Bert’s windshield. But even if the sky had been cloudless and the air clear and bright, I would have been struck by the eerie pathos of the dreadful scene.

It was hard to believe that the lighthouse had been moved to its present location, as Mark had told me it had. To begin with, it was constructed of brick and set on a monumental granite base, and its stolid octagonal form conveyed the distinct impression of permanence. It was attached to a structure twice as wide, a cheery brick edifice that resembled nothing so much as a taut and tidy gingerbread house. Its window frames were painted a brisk shade of azure, and a charming little porch with jigsaw trim was tucked into a sheltered alcove between the lighthouse and one of the walls of the residence.

Henry and I had rested on the porch steps when we walked over here on Saturday. He’d made several circuits of the lighthouse’s granite base, leaning into the brick structure to offset the sloping angle of the base’s topmost molding. I had only seen one ghost that day, on the upper of the two cast-iron balconies that encircled the beacon. I had pointedly ignored him, being preoccupied with thoughts of Henry and Vivi and worried about the presence of a lighthouse keeper, who might not appreciate strangers lounging on his or her steps. But we hadn’t encountered anyone (live). No one seemed to be around.

Today, though, mesmerized by the sight of forty or fifty earthbound spirits, I barely heard Bert’s voice when he asked, “You want to stop?”

The ethereal creatures were everywhere: pacing wretchedly
on the rocks between the grass and the sea, ambling slowly around the beacon’s cast-iron balconies, lying motionless on the grass, oblivious to the clouds and the raindrops, staring up into the endless dome.

“Anza?”

“Sorry! What?”

“You want me to stop?”

I did and didn’t. These had to be ghosts from the
Larchmont
. Their clothing gave them away, as did the fact that they were all clumped together in little groups, as though still living out the shared tragedy of the lifeboats and rafts.

Ghosts can see and speak with each other, but they almost never do. Just as we usually ignore the people we pass on the street every day and sit beside on buses and planes, ghosts live in their own little worlds, preoccupied with their own histories and memories. Just like us, they keep largely to themselves when encountering strangers in public, even if those strangers happen to share their existential predicament.

But these ghosts, I knew, had banded together. If Baden Riegler had his story straight, at least some of these phantoms were united in a furious plot to try to drive Mark and Lauren off the island. If I had been alone, I might well have approached one or two of the spirits on the fringes, if only to learn the identities of the group’s ringleaders. But I wouldn’t do it with Bert here.

“I should probably get back,” I said. “It’s beautiful, though.”

Bert gave a little shiver. “It gives me the creeps. I don’t know why.”

I did, but I kept the presence of so many ghosts to myself. “Well, lighthouses exist because of danger and shipwrecks. If I were a fisherman, they might give me the creeps, too.”

“Maybe. I suppose that’s it.”

“Do you ever go out at night?”

“Sure, yeah. I mean, I don’t
go
out at night, but sometimes I
am
out at night. Tuna and swordfish are farther and farther out, these days. It’s barely worthwhile unless I’m out there for a couple of days.”

“Really? Wow!”

“Don’t be too impressed.”

“I am! Are you all by yourself?”

“All by myself?” He made a sad little face, teasing me for using such a childlike phrase. “Sometimes.”

“Who steers? When you’re sleeping? I know that’s probably a stupid question.” The sky was growing darker and darker, gearing up for a storm. I heard the rumble of thunder in the distance, and this struck me as odd. I think of thunderstorms as phenomena of July and August, when scorching days just seem to heat up and burst.

“It’s not stupid,” Bert said. “The boat’s got a lot of navigation gear. It’s not like in the old days.”

The truck had rounded a bend, and my heartbeat was returning to normal. I was vaguely aware of the fleeting form of a ghost, beginning to run from a point to the right of us toward the road ahead. She seemed to be in her late twenties and she was barefoot and wearing a tattered nightdress. Her arms were outstretched and her expression was frozen in a mask of fear and horror. She was headed toward the corner our truck was about to turn.

My gaze flew to the road before us.

There, at a point we would reach in a matter of seconds, was a small child, a boy.

I gasped instinctively and grabbed Bert’s arm.

His gaze flew to my face. “What?”

“Look out!” I screamed, realizing that it was already too late, we were too close, the child’s mother would never have time to reach him before the truck hit him. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned away, my stomach muscles tight and braced for the sickening thud of an impact.

The truck swerved slightly to the right, but I heard nothing: no squealing of brakes, no outcry from Bert, no sound of hurling metal colliding with vulnerable human flesh.

I opened my eyes. It had all happened so fast that I’d been unable to make my usual distinctions. The figure had not been a child, but a ghost, and I believed I knew who he was.

Jamey.

“Oh my gosh! I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Let me guess,” Bert responded. “You saw a ghost.”

I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me or not. “We drove right through him.”

Bert’s eyebrows shot up. He gave a long, low whistle and appeared to be trying to take this in. “So you can’t tell the difference between a ghost and a live person?” he finally asked.

“No, no, I can! Ghosts are transparent: you can see right through them. But it all happened too fast.”

“What
happened too fast?”

“The little boy ran into the road. I mean, the ghost. My mind couldn’t make the adjustment quickly enough.”

Bert cleared his throat and stared straight ahead. He was silent for several moments, concentrating on the road. He turned on the windshield wipers.

“The little boy,” he finally stated flatly.

“Yeah. I know you don’t believe in ghosts, but—well, there was just a little kid, a ghost boy, in the road.”

“Okaaaay …”

He looked over at me. I smiled apologetically.

“But he’s all right,” I went on. “We didn’t hurt him or anything. I mean, he’s already dead. But we didn’t make him—any
deader.”

“Awful glad to hear it,” he drawled.

I
WISHED I COULD
have just sneaked out of the Grand View with Henry, dropped him off at Caleb’s house, and gone to the senator’s cocktail party without getting into it all with Lauren, but there was no way I could do that. This is one of the trade-offs of the intimate B and B experience, especially when your hosts are warm and welcoming: you don’t feel right treating the place like a hotel and coming and going without offering explanations.

Besides, this was a very small island. Given Lauren’s friendship with Aitana and Mark’s with Bert, word was sure to get back to my hosts that I had been at the party. I didn’t see any alternative to handling it directly.

Lauren was sitting on the front porch having a cup of tea when I climbed the steps. It was a little after three thirty and I had done everything I could possibly do at the Historical Society, at least until our samples arrived. I was hoping to squeeze in a quick nap before picking up Henry at five. I was still trying to recover from that night of no sleep.

“Cup of tea?” Lauren asked.

“No thanks.” I sat down beside her. “Listen, I hope this isn’t a problem, but I don’t think we’ll be having supper here tonight. You haven’t already started anything, have you?”

“No, no, but …” She was probably wondering where we were going to eat.

“Henry’s spending the evening with Caleb’s girls, and, well, to tell you the truth, it feels a little like a command performance, but the senator asked Caleb to bring me.”

“To the party?”

I nodded. “I can’t get out of it. I tried.”

“Why would you want to get out of it?” Lauren asked.

Because he didn’t invite you guys
, I thought. I would have loved to have said this aloud, but drawing attention to my hosts’ exclusion was almost as insensitive as the omission itself.